Sunday, December 16, 2007

Blogger outs web host malware attack

A moment of narcissism by a blogger who covers kink, multiple sex partners and other topics has uncovered a sophisticated attack that secretly installed malware on end user machines by compromising thousands of websites maintained by a large webhost and ginning search results on Google. Yes, we've heard of cache spam before. That's a technique by which attackers try to raise the search ranking of malicious sites by spraying the web with links. And the wholesale hijacking of websites so they unwittingly redirect visitors to malicious destinations is nothing new, either. But there are several things that set this attack apart.